Archive for Jun 2010

The CTO Breakfast will be this Friday (Jun 25) at 8am in the Novell cafeteria. Anyone interested in how information technology is used to build products or run companies is welcome. Despite it's name, you don't have to be a CTO to attend--just interested in technology, where it's headed, and the problems of starting and building a high-tech business in Utah. Be sure to view the Google calendar of future CTO Breakfast events.Continue reading...

An event loop is a message dispatcher. The loop runs, waiting for events, and responding to them. This is how I've come to think of the Kynetx Network Service (KNS): a big, programmable event loop that runs in the cloud. We haven't always thought of KNS as an event loop, we used to think of it as a ruleset evaluation engine. These ruleset evaluations were tied to users visiting a page. We now view that as just one kind of event (a pageview event, to be specific). We also promoted some other events in the system (like Web clicksContinue reading...

This week on Technometria, Scott and I talk with Sam Lightstone about his new book Making It Big in Software. The book isn't just about great software personalities, although you could be forgiven for thinking so looking at the cover. This excellent book is career advice for developers at every stage. The interviews with 17 software greats are interspersed between the chapters on everything from what they didn't teach you in school to becoming a leader and visionary. I enjoyed talking to Sam and reading the book.Continue reading...

I'm encouraging everyone I know to vote for Joel Wright for Utah County Commission. Joel is running against Gary Anderson. Joel is experienced and believes that the proper role for county government in creating jobs is to keep taxes low, plan for and build needed infrastructure, and stay out of the way. Joel recognizes that Utah county will have 1,000,000 residents (twice our current population) in 20 years and the time to plan for that growth is now. If you're of a mind to vote for Joel, the following table (taken from the Utah County clerk) shows early votingContinue reading...

I'm starting a new business called Kynetx. As I go through some of the things I do, I'm planning to blog them. The whole series will be here. This is the twenty-fourth installment. You may find my efforts instructive. Or you may know a better way---if so, please let me know! Some companies are "high-tech" companies. That is, their business model requires building custom technology that differentiates them from their competitors. Others don't differentiate through technology per se, but how they use it. In other words, their business model isn't very dependent upon building intellectual property in the formContinue reading...

Saturday was my birthday. About a month ago, I told everyone at Kynetx that what I wanted for my birthday was some cool Kynetx apps. On Thursday at noon, we shut down normal work and everyone broke into teams. They had 24 hours to program an app that would impress their competition. We called this the Kynetx Code Run; it's loosely modeled after Atlassian's FedEx Day. The rules were pretty simple: Teams can consiste of 1, 2, or 3 people. Remote employees are encouraged to be at KWHQ for the event. Apps that can be listedContinue reading...

One of the things I hate about syncing my iPhone is that it fires up iPhoto everytime there's any pictures that need to be imported. That's a pain. I'd rather that the photos got automatically imported and deleted off the device. Today I figured out how to do it. Note that these instructions assume Snow Leopard. First thing to know is that Image Capture is your friend. You can use it to determine what happens when you plug in a device that looks like a camera on a device-by-device basis. For our purposes, there's a littleContinue reading...

The CTO Breakfast will be held this Thursday, June 3 at 8am in the Novell Cafeteria. Anyone interested in how information technology is used to build products or run companies is welcome. Despite it's name, you don't have to be a CTO to attend--just interested in technology, where it's headed, and the problems of starting and building a high-tech business in Utah. Be sure to view the Google calendar of future events.Continue reading...